A recently abandoned cottage overlooking the Atlantic on a blazing day in early September; Dursey Island, Beara

In the final part of his great survey Britannia (1586), William Camden described five ‘armes of the sea’ jutting out into the Atlantic. These are the jagged fingers of south-west Ireland - geological hazard, yet mentally encoded as integral features of the island’s iconic shape. As Camden indicated, the peninsulas of Dingle, Iveragh, Beara, Mizen Head and Sheep’s Head, with their ‘crooked and winding shoares’, are strikingly rugged. Yet, viewed on satellite mode, they soften into a gentle terminus, where Ireland seems to crumble into the expectant ocean.

I arrived in merry Killarney on the penultimate day of August, with the intention of cycling Iveragh. But the night before picking up the bike, I had a change of heart. Realising jut how many others thronging the pubs had come to experience the Ring of Kerry, I followed my gut: instead of turning right at Kenmare towards Sneem, I crossed the bridge and followed the R571 west into Beara, the second of Camden’s ‘armes’, which is nestled between the Kenmare River (really an estuary), and Bantry Bay.

‘Beare’, Camden wrote in his necessarily aloof and cursory way, stands for the most part ‘upon hungrie gravell and a leane stony soile.’ Dominated by mountains thrown up in the same orogeny that created Carrauntoohil, Ireland’s highest peak, which can be glimpsed across the ‘River’, Beara is certainly a craggy, unforgiving land. Looming over much of the route are austere outcrops and brooding mountains whose appearance occasionally verges on the sinister - as at Hungry Hill, the peninsula’s own highest point, whose sharp, striated surfaces seem to bode the traveller ill.

Yet, cast in the glow of a late-summer heatwave, the flatter land by the coast appeared gloriously verdant. The region’s climate is strongly influenced by the Gulf Stream, which carries warm air thousands of miles across the ocean from the Tropics, ensuring mild winters and abundant rainfall. On the initial stretch, I cycled past beautiful meadows ending at the shore, sometimes graced by a lone Sessile oak, and alongside hedgerows bedecked with ripening blackberries. Every now and again, I passed into the relative gloom of a tree tunnel, their canopies enclosing a road whose steep banks were vibrant with ferns. It was exhilarating to finally be there, and I made good progress along the coast road, my spirits high.

The roads are simply too narrow for tourist coaches here, and so Beara is peaceful, devoid of official photo spots, and often beyond the reach of cell masts - making it easy to romanticise as a remnant of a bygone Ireland. Especially towards the rugged western tip, though, reminders of its more frenzied past abound. In Allihies, where a rich copper deposit was discovered in 1812, the surest sign is a Cornish-style engine house, which stands sentry on a rough hill outside the village. For the best part of a century, the area reverberated with the sound of machinery crushing ore-bearing quartz, which was then sent off across the Sea to Swansea to be smelted into ingots for export around the world. But with the onset of the Great Famine, Beara’s population plummeted, leaving behind a landscape studded with crumbling cottages.

After about an hour cycling along the Ring Road, I made my first detour inland. A few kilometres in, the undulating lane I was following gave way to a rough track. Leaving the bike near a ruined famine house, I made my way, with bated breath, to the Circle of Uragh. The megaliths stand solitary on a knoll between two loughs, the solemn Caha Mountains looming beyond. Cascading from one precipice is the silvery thread of a waterfall. The circle consists of five small stones facing one another, and an imposing menhir, three-metres tall, covered in bright moss and lichen.

It was a truly awe-inspiring place, exuding a sense of ancient Earth wisdom. I wasn’t far from the Kenmare River, but it felt like I could be deep within the interior. It seemed obvious, in the moment, why Bronze Age people had chosen this site. It was perfect for a ritual monument - numinous, probably, even subtracting the fruit of their labour. Still, the stones radiated a kind of energy which enveloped the entire landscape, infusing it with a mystery that similarly secluded ‘wild’ places lack.

The sky was heavy with clouds tinted a deep purple, but as I stood there, it began to clear, casting the stones in sunlight and somehow lessening their charisma. It’s strange, I thought to myself back on the road, that we seem to prefer these monuments set against a moody backdrop. Is it simply memetic desire, shaped by atmospheric images imbibed from Instagram or Oxfam finds, or something deeper, more fundamental? Devotional rites and their associated iconography are often steeped in blinding light. Yet stone circles tend to look better in shadow - and in monochrome for that matter.

Ireland has two major clusters of megalithic stone circles. One spans the counties of Cork and Kerry, whose border runs through Beara; the other is in Ulster, at the far end of the isle. Earlier that day, I’d visited a smaller site with a ticket booth on the edge of Kenmare, manned by a cheery teenager. The low stones, speckled with crustose lichen, were enclosed by a thick wall of vegetation, the grass neatly mown. Yet even in its manicured state, I was absorbed by the congregation, paying my respects to each delegate in turn. It had been years since I’d been somewhere similar. I was taken to the Callanish stones on Lewis as a child but hadn’t given prehistory much thought since. Perhaps it takes a certain maturity of mind to open up to the uncanny power of these monuments - to feel the weight of time pressing through their silent, overdetermined forms.

Sometimes, when immersed in places like Beara, it’s possible, just about, to imagine you’re inhabiting a totality. To grasp, however fleetingly, the sense of inhabiting a limitless land. But this requires bracketing prior knowledge of its history and geography - much of what you learned, actually, in primary school. Thanks to geospatial tools like Google Earth, we’ve become accustomed to visualising the world on the grandest of scales, as a spinning orb in space, but also as somehow interactive - scalable.

Yet, for the people who roamed Beara during the two-thousand year span of the Bronze Age, these same valleys, crags, and beaches were everything. With the peninsula now threaded together with roads converging into colourful villages where it’s possible to fill up with fuel brought from distant seas and pay via Mastercard for a Red Bull, it takes some effort to imagine. But I tried to access this thought, of Beara as the world.

My experience on the promontory followed a pleasing arc, with the drama of the landscape heightening as I peddled towards the western tip. The sense of remoteness grew stronger with every mile. Villages and farms cluster mostly along the Ring, while the peninsula’s interior, as I gleaned from Google Earth, is predominantly stark and treeless - what we tend to think of as ‘wild.’ But how far the baseline has shifted!

By some definitions, ‘wilderness’ refers to provinces of the uninhabited and uninhabitable, areas uninfluenced by humans and without vestiges of domesticity, culture or civilisation. Antarctica or the Kamchatka Peninsula, perhaps. But certainly not Beara in the twenty-first century. Not so long ago, things were different. Much of the land was cloaked in dense temperate rainforest. But from Elizabethan times on, reckless deforestation by English settlers set in motion a destructive slide towards shallower, more acidic soils that, despite the Gulf Stream’s blessings, could no longer support such a riot of life.

Seen in a different light, then, much of Beara has been rendered a wasteland by humans and their animals - an ecological desert, to use a phrase favoured by Eoghan Daltun. On 73 acres of fenced-off land near the village of Eyeries, Daltun is privilege to an ongoing process of localised redemption: the gradual recovery of a species-rich Atlantic rainforest. In his 2022 book, he vividly captures the shifting rhythms of fauna in his woods, Bofickil: wrens, hares, lizards, dragonflies, and damselflies in summer; jays in autumn; and in winter, a 'multispecies horde' of small passerines - tits, goldcrests, and perhaps treecreepers - scouring the branches for invertebrate snacks.

‘There is true liberation and healing in forsaking the worry and discord of the human sphere for a while, before re-enganging with renewed energy, and clarity around what really matters, and what doesn’t’, he writes (p.86). Daltun’s passionate rewilding efforts lend yet another layer of significance to this already richly textured place.

A patch of domestication by Kenmare River, Beara

My adventure climaxed on Beara’s western extremity, a narrow, double-humped chunk of land cut off by meltwater at the end of the last Ice Age: Dursey Island. It is today accessed by Ireland’s only cable car, a slightly worn-out contraption in which I didn’t feel completely secure. In the early eighth century, Viking raiders seized Dursey and used it as a depot for keeping slaves. They renamed it ‘Tor Iy’ (Island of the god Tur); when English filtered in, it became Tur’s Iy, and, later, Dursey.

I walked the loop on what felt like a blazingly hot day for Ireland in September. At the top of the first rise, coloured rust by bracken and dead ferns, a wonderful view opened up over a distant dry-stone patchwork and ramshackle cottages. Dursey was once home to three villages or ‘townlands’: Ballynacallagh, Kilmichael, and Tilickafinna. Today, only a handful of houses are cared for.

From there, I traversed a saddle before ascending to the island’s highest point, where a squat signal tower built by British forces during the Napoleonic Wars stands - one in a chain of lookout posts designed to monitor maritime activities. After the Irish Rebellion of 1798, many revolutionaries hoped that Bonaparte would use Ireland as a staging ground for an audacious invasion of Britain. But, of course, he had other ideas. I sat on the grass nearby and had lunch. The jagged fins of the Skelligs were visible rising from the sparkling Ocean, the mainland coast snaking round behind. A spectacular 360 degree panorama.

At the island's furthest tip, Dursey’s own offspring came into view: two rocky islets known as the Bull and the Calf. At the base of a cliff was a towering sea stack, echoed the monolith at Uragh. As I turned back towards the island's sole inhabited hamlet, I was surprised to come across a donkey standing in the middle of the road. We seized each other up for a moment, before the donkey lost interest and moseyed away before I’d managed to take a photo.

‘Is he smiling for you?’, I heard someone say. An old man emerged from a whitewashed cottage. It turned out he was born in that very house. Although now living in Blackburn, he returns to Dursey every summer to catch lobsters. Much has changed since his childhood, when Dursey was seldom visited by outsiders: just a couple of weeks ago, there was a two-hour wait for the cable car. We fed the donkey a couple of apples, which were eagerly munched into a kind of viscous soup, and I was on my way.